Whitaker Ideas Forum: Tom Gillespie, Picture or Playground? Valuing Coastal Amenities

The Fall 2017 Whitaker Ideas Forum series continues on 8 November with a seminar by Tom Gillespie of the SEMRU research cluster on the topic of ‘Picture or playground? Valuing coastal amenities’.

Coastlines provide numerous valuable ecosystems and recreational goods and services. When placing a value on coastal amenities, more consideration is given to the provisioning services–such as fisheries and aquaculture–rather than cultural ecosystem services that they provide, for example, aesthetic values.

The aim of this discussion is to determine the effect of the coastline on house prices, thereby estimating values for various coastal attributes based on their proximity to the house and also whether the house has a view of the coastal feature. This methodology for environmental valuation is known as hedonic price modelling. The seminar investigates if people value having a picture of the coast via a window in their house more than having direct access to the coast for recreational purposes. The analysis uses a rich dataset from Daft.ie, which has over 2.5 million observations for sales and lettings in Ireland since 2006. The paper also uses geographic information systems (GIS) modelling to determine distances to coastal features as well as 3D spatial modelling techniques to determine a houses’ view of the sea.

Aerial view of Salthill, Galway